shut up and dance

Today I missed a bus, discovered that my umbrella leaks, rode on the slowest Red Line Train ever, was dripped on by the person in the seat next to me and got my wrist caught in a Green Line subway car door at Park Street and had to painfully yank my hand out of the door.  The day has pretty much started out fired.  I am glad that I already have lunch here at the office and do not need to leave the safety of these walls.

The production of last night's SYTYCD was a mess, and not even a very hot one.  I really don't think we'd seen some of the final top 20 at any point during the previous two hours, and in general the editing was odd.  I have no idea if some of the top 20 were good choices or not, though there were a few I was definitely happy to see make it.  They seemed to represent a pretty good cross-section of dance styles, from what I could tell.  The judges were pretty harsh, judging people not only on their dancing but on their overall attitude.  I think that's good though.  The message was don't make excuses, don't go into belabored explanations, just do it, and have the faith that you will be able to do it so that your audience believes that you are in fact doing it.  Can't argue with any of that, even if I felt bad for at least one of the contestants who got a dressing down over excuses and explanations.

Supposedly they are going to have the contestants do dance styles that have not been featured on the show before.  That is intriguing. I hope we get to see them do a Bollywood number :-)

i ain't nuthin' but a gorehound

I am not usually a fan of the movie reviews of Stephanie Zacharek, movie critic at Salon, but I love the opening sentence of her review of Dario Argento's new film Mother of Tears:

We've lost something in the culture of horror movies when a good, solid evisceration at the hands of slobbery, bloodthirsty demons has come to seem old-timey and quaint, a comforting relic of drive-in gorefests and '70s-era Times Square double features.

 Yeah, they just don't eviscerate them like they used to...  I'm not even being sarcastic, it's true.  The other big change in horror films, I think, is that good versus evil has really faded away in favor of terror by random psychotics, which in turn means plot has essentially faded away as well.  If your villain has no motive besides being insane, there's really no need for a plot. And thus the horror genre has become stupid.